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Frank Fukuyama Visiting Pardee RAND June 20 to Talk About Bureaucratic Autonomy and the Decay of American Institutions

Posted on June 19th, 2013

Frank Fukuyama – Photo Courtesy of RAND Corporation, Diane Baldwin

Frank Fukuyama, renowned political scientist and Pardee RAND Graduate School board member, will be visiting to talk with students and faculty about his forthcoming book Political Order and Political Decay: From the French Revolution to the Present on June 20, 2013. His talk is entitled, Bureaucratic Autonomy and the Decay of American Institutions.

High quality government depends on both state capacity and an appropriate degree of bureaucratic autonomy. Compared to parliamentary democracies with stronger traditions of bureaucracy, the US has traditionally been seen as a state of “courts and parties” with an under-developed, weakly autonomous executive. Despite the growth of a large administrative state in the 20th century, the dominance of courts and parties over the executive has intensified in recent decades. This phenomenon is a source both of administrative dysfunction and popular perceptions of illegitimacy in American government.

Francis Fukuyama is an Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is a RAND Trustee, and a member of the PRGS Board of Governors. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, 1983-89, and 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. His latest book, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution was published in April 2011. Frank is chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the Center for Global Development. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, and the advisory boards for the Journal of Democracy, the Inter-American Dialogue, and The New America Foundation. He is a member of the American Political Science Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Pacific Council for International Affairs.